Tag Archives: constellations

With the help of my brother & his girlfriend, I transformed the most boring wall in my entire house.

This is what the wall looked like when I first moved in:

It’s 10′ high, over 18′ long and felt like a hospital corridor. It was just a sea of white and I’ve been dreaming of a way to change it for two years now. However, everything I’ve wanted was either A. Too expensive, B. Too difficult for a DIY job, or C. Too expensive (I can’t stress this enough). Until now!

We started by painting the entire wall with a gallon of Behr Marquee paint in the color Secret Society. It was hands down the best paint I’ve ever used. It went on in a single coat and there was almost no smell! I was floored.

The next day, we gathered our tools:

Scissors, white chalk, masking tape, string, a star map with an overlaid grid that I made in photoshop, and decorative nails in three different sizes- 3/8″, 7/16″, and the half inch-ish pyramid tacks from Target. I love thee, Nate Berkus. Let me count the ways…

Using chalk, we marked off every foot on all four sides of the wall and then used these marks to tape up lengths of string. It needed to be as tight as possible to avoid droopy lines, so this took a while to complete. For the vertical lines, we decided that only two were necessary because we could keep moving them down the wall as the design was being marked. So, the top of each string has a piece of masking tape and the bottom had a weight tied to it:

The top was taped to the chalk mark and the weight was aligned with the bottom. Then we got to marking out the star map- A small dot stood for where to put a 3/8″ nail, an X marked the 7/16″ nails, and a circle stood for the pyramid tacks. Square by square, we used the gridded map to plot out where all of our nails would go.

Next, we put up all the nails and wiped away any chalk that showed with a damp kitchen towel.

I decided this looked too random for my taste and went out to buy a gold paint pen from Jerry’s Artarama. Using a ruler, I drew lines to connect the stars within each constellation. The short lines were done freehand, otherwise I would still be on a ladder marking everything.

And here is what it looked like before we put all the furniture back into place:

For just over $50 and a weekend’s worth of time, we decorated almost 20′ of wall space. You’d think the dark color would make the room feel smaller and dark, but it doesn’t. The constellations make your eyes go all the way up to the ceiling and dance around from star to star. When natural light hits the pyramids, there’s a sparkle that lights up the entire entry way. My plan was to treat this as I would wallpaper and hang up art, but I can’t make myself do it! I think it’ll stay this way for a while…